Fest celebrates farm life in Lake County
On a day when many Chicagoans were focused on their favorite animal — the Chicago Bear — others decided to venture into Lake County to view goats, sheep, chickens and cows.
At the 19th annual Farm Heritage Festival, held by the Lake County Discovery Museum and the Lake County Farm Heritage Association at the Lakewood Forest Preserve in Wauconda, they celebrated Lake County’s rural roots.
Events included a parade of tractors, tractor driving for children, a petting farm, a sheepherding demonstration that included a real sheepdog and a variety of other demonstrations, such as spinning, weaving, quilting and lace making.
“The purpose of this event is to get the residents of Lake County back in touch with Lake County’s agricultural roots,” said museum educator Seleena Kuester. “We are interested in the history of Lake County and preserving the history of Lake County here at the museum. The agricultural history is just as important as any other part. It’s not something that people get to see very much anymore. We think it’s important to be able to show them how things were done in the past.”
The festival offered a chance for some to reconnect with their rural heritage.
“I am basically a farm kid, and some of the tractors I’m very familiar with from my childhood days,” said Wauconda resident Arnold Eilert, who comes from Kansas and still has some land there that he visits for harvesting.
And for children, it was just plain good old-fashioned fun.
Mark and Carrie Dykstra of Barrington watched as their 4-year-old son, Luke, romped in the hay.
“I like seeing him play like this as opposed to just in a park,” Mark Dykstra said. “There are no video games in that haystack.”
Carrie Dykstra said she likes the way the festival shows children the way things used to be.
The festival gave Bill Werner, who lives on a 5-acre farm between Mundelein and Wauconda, a chance to exhibit his turkeys and chickens.
When asked about the challenges of raising his animals, he said turkeys are the hardest to raise.
“When they are chicks, they are susceptible to a lot of things. The main thing is to keep them warm and dry — out of the wind and rain,” he said.
Kim Denny of the Highland Green Nursery in Grayslake demonstrated threshing and winnowing techniques, using wheat as the model grain.
Wearing a red plaid shirt and overalls, Denny regaled his listeners with farming lore, while thrashing the oats with a whip-like implement and also displaying such old-fashioned farming tools as a cradle scythe and an Amish-crafted winnowing basket. He tossed the latter into the air, literally separating the wheat from the chaff.
Denny said the tools are handmade tools that farmers would have used in the 1800s, reminiscent of Little House on the Prairie.
He said many children today “don’t have a clue (about what) makes their oatmeal or their wheat bread. They don’t have a clue that all stuff is direct from farm to food.”
Tom Evans of South Barrington, who attended with his 9-year-old daughter, Nicole, and his 13-year-old son, Alex, appreciated the opportunity to see the animals and the farming methods from 100 years ago. He said he has been coming to the festival for about 10 years.
He said it gives children an understanding of where their food comes from.
“They just don’t magically show up at a Jewel or Dominick’s. It comes from somebody or somewhere,” he said.